The Gomorrah Gambit

by Tom Chatfield

  By way of an answer, Odi fastens one strap tightly around Azi’s upper arm, sprays something from two of the bottles onto both the blade of the knife and Azi’s skin, then points to the other strap. “You bite it,” he explains. “I have applied local anesthetic and disinfectant. Once I go in, it will be bad. But you are strong enough. Sit, please.”

  Azi sits awkwardly on the toilet’s closed lid, his arm outstretched. Odi washes his hands, leaving the hand-dryer running as he takes up the knife. “Bite hard,” he cautions. “And try to send your mind elsewhere.”

  Before Azi can protest, Odi offers him the strap. Azi takes it between his teeth. What choice does he have? Odi moves with inexorable care, removing the bandages covering the tracker’s insertion point. The skin underneath is a bruised mess, a small slit livid at its heart. Odi smiles at Azi, grasps his arm, then brings up the blade. Before Azi has fully registered what’s about to happen, the knife enters his body.

  At first there’s no pain: only a tugging sensation followed by pressure, then intense cold. Azi looks away, his teeth biting deep into the leather, his gaze locked on what he realizes is the cleaning schedule for this toilet: a laminated sheet of paper with a box for each hour of the day. The rows of neat ticks in felt pen suggest that whoever does the cleaning takes great pride in their work.

  Then the pain arrives. It comes from next to the bone, with a scraping rawness that is almost instantly too much to bear. There’s a terrible moaning sound which, Azi realizes, is coming from his own mouth and can’t be stopped. He thrashes his head from side to side, choking on the bitter leather. It’s worse than being stabbed—far worse—and he can feel himself losing control. His arm trembles and flexes against Odi’s grip; tears fill his eyes; his feet thump and lurch as everything except the present moment vanishes.

  Then it’s over. Something sticky from another bottle is being applied to his skin, followed by bandages. Azi is offered a pair of pills that he gulps without water as soon as he’s able to prize his jaw open. Odi wipes the blade, slips it into his pocket, then gathers Azi into a quick embrace.

  “I’m proud of you.”

  Azi allows himself to be held, trembling. After a moment, Odi releases him and begins methodically to unpack items from his bag.

  “Look, here. I have your new clothes; earpieces for both yourself and Adam; a burner phone you can use to deliver the hack; even some sunglasses. And a few extras for me—for the extremely sophisticated diversionary method I am poised to deploy.”

  As he has on several previous occasions, Azi gets the sense that Odi finds all this somehow amusing. But this time he doesn’t mind. Bracing himself against the wall, Azi massages his jaw, adopts what he hopes is a courageous intonation and tries to talk his future into being.

  “Okay, let me see if I get it. Ad stays here, running the tech, ready to find out the exact source of the Gomorrah IPs and scrape all their data—provided I can get in and give him access. Meanwhile, you ensure we’re not violently intercepted. One, two, three, profit.”

  “Precisely.” Odi ties off the bandage on Azi’s forearm and passes him a pristine shirt. With difficulty, Ad wriggles into his new clothes.

  “One last thing, Odi. Is there anything I ought to know about your diversion before, you know, you start diverting?”

  Odi looks almost childishly eager.

  “Only that I’m joking about the sophistication. Your tracker is in my pocket; I have already located and pocketed the two attached to your friend; Yacine and his car will now meet me at the back entrance. I will make it look as though all of us are fleeing at great speed. It will be immensely distracting, I promise.”

  With unexpected formality, Odi offers Azi his hand and then shakes it, firmly, before offering his farewell.

  “You will be bought as much time as possible. I am resting my hopes on you. And…” Odi hesitates “…we must both hope that your friend doesn’t utterly fuck everything up.”

  Forty-two

  Five minutes later, entirely unmolested, Azi crosses a sunbaked eight-lane road and walks onto the Existential Institute campus.

  Odi is gone as promised, amid squealing tires. Ad silently inspected Azi’s new look—sunglasses, baseball cap, skinny jeans, Superdry shirt, old-school Reebok tennis shoes—then pronounced him an immaculate douchebag CTO.

  As well as his new threads and an aching arm, Azi is sporting a hidden earpiece, a burner phone loaded with malware, and the name Douglas Dingwall.

  It’s all so ridiculous he hasn’t yet managed to become terrified.

  Contrary to Azi’s expectations, the campus is low-rise and almost invisible from the outside, sprawling between the highway and the bay on land that hosted nothing but mud and seabirds until the Institute landed like a terraforming spaceship. A footpath shaded by the ribs of a wooden pergola creeps alongside private roads, car parks and lush vegetation. It’s more like a botanical garden than a corporate headquarters. There’s not a single other person to be seen—which, given Azi’s extreme time restrictions, makes it an immense relief when a man riding what looks like a minimalist golf cart hurtles down the path towards him.

  “Hey, Doug, welcome! Man, this is a buzz. To have you here, to be able to do this—I’m so excited. We are so excited. I’m Chuck, and I’m all yours. Hop on!”

  Chuck is dressed with uncanny similarity to Azi—sunglasses, baseball cap, skinny jeans, Lanvin shirt, Common Project sneakers—and manages to inject his greeting with radiant sincerity. Health, ease and enthusiasm being the tech industry’s primary status markers, Azi assumes he must be important. Then Ad starts to speak from somewhere deep in his ear.

  We’re up and running, mate. This is Charles Bartlett, Director of Digital Evangelism. Most senior guy I could get hold of. You’re meeting him for some super-hasty ideation-cum-inspiration. There’s a pause. He’s a total psycho. But he’s not stupid, so watch out.

  Azi hops on. Building Number One, their destination, is the same size and shape as two aircraft hangars bolted together, and it seems everything else has been made to match. The walkway they’re on would qualify as a minor road in England. The unhelpfully abstract map at its entrance is thirty feet high, etched into a glinting sheet of matte metal. The flower beds, irregularly strewn between secondary buildings, boast boulders, waterfalls and trees of a magnitude usually associated with national parks. It’s almost as if the architect were making a joke about corporate gigantism.

  There’s a Disneyland feel to their journey: wooden beams flash overhead, the electric motor buzzes under their seats. The entire site, Azi’s escort tells him in ecstatic tones, is a garden city, its water constantly recycled, much of its food grown in the vast garden on Building One’s roof. For good measure, a series of giant robots can reshape large parts of the architecture at will. Azi can’t help interrupting at this.

  “Excuse me, did you say giant robots?”

  “Oh yeah! They’re super sweet. Giant robot cranes, hidden in the ground. Erasmus is a god when it comes to future-proofing. His vision for this place, his breadth of mind…” Chuck tails off into wistfulness. I told you they were insane, mutters Ad’s ghost.

  According to Ad, the Institute enjoys a steadily increasing endowment of over ten billion dollars, drawn from the pockets of multi-billionaire donors who watch TED talks in search of causes adequate to their ambitions. Causes don’t come larger than the future of humanity and thus, it seems, neither do endowments.

  The cart glides to a halt next to a totem pole fashioned from recycled metal, where Azi is ushered under a veranda of angular wooden beams, girders and beaten metal panels. A ten-foot-high door glides open as they approach, leading into a soaring reception area where one dark-shirted employee eyes Azi sullenly from behind a standing desk. Douglas Dingwall, Azi has decided, is a grumpily taciturn Brit—and he’s delighted to have found someone offering a truly British nadir of customer service on whom he can try out his new personality.

  “Name,” the receptionist morosely in
tones.

  “Douglas Dingwall,” Azi intones right back.

  “Title.”

  “Chief Technology Officer, Total Knowledge.”

  “Passport or driving license.”

  This is the point at which his ersatz outrage needs to be perfect. Azi looks at the man as if he has just been asked to supply a vellum parchment. “Physical identification? You’re still using a physical identification system?” This produces an apologetic cough, so Azi keeps going. “I find that amusing. I am my identification: my face, my eyes, my body, my data. That’s all I carry, so don’t waste my time. Just fucking Google me.”

  After a frantic gesture from Chuck, the man at the reception desk does exactly that—bringing up, Azi hopes, Ad’s redirect of the Total Knowledge website and matching search results. Azi glowers, switching his gaze pointedly between Chuck, the receptionist and an abstract metallic sculpture that might be either two penguins or a fantastically inept nude.

  Under Chuck’s watchful eye, the receptionist toils through several screens of results, rolls his eyes at the breach of protocol, then prints a pass and hands it over. Chuck twitches like a marionette and affixes it to Azi’s shirt.

  “I’ll have to escort you personally! Very unorthodox, but that’s what we love about you guys…you live data, you breathe data, you are data. It’s beautiful. So, you’re my very special guest. And given you haven’t been here before, you’ll want to pay attention. This is the good bit!”

  Oh wow, Ad’s voice murmurs mockingly, you’re about to get the stupid door treatment. Chuck must be in love.

  Azi has no idea why Ad is talking about doors, but the blunt force of Chuck’s charisma is difficult to question at close quarters. Before Azi can do any more glowering, Chuck touches his ID card to a dark panel. A thirty-foot section of glass wall in front of them begins to ripple, shimmer and then break, its surface splitting into a dozen shards. Azi flinches as each shard commences a leisurely journey towards a hidden niche in the walls. Chuck beams like a preacher at the promise of salvation.

  “Pretty mind-blowing, right? We don’t open it for everyone, there’s a regular door round the side. Special visitors only! Erasmus commissioned it. He came up with the concept, there’s a patent in his name. Where the Ocean Meets the Sky. That’s what he called it. Erasmus loves the ocean. It’s where we glimpse eternity. Where all life began.”

  Azi mulls this for a moment. “Rod Stewart,” he says.

  “What?”

  “Rod Stewart. Where the line comes from. It’s a song, right? ‘Rhythm of My Heart,’ with bagpipes at the start. Kind of a Scottish country rock vibe.”

  “No, no. It’s not that.”

  “Erasmus isn’t into British rock?”

  “He is not, no.”

  “Shame. I love a bit of early nineties Rod Stewart.”

  As the shards of glass finish their miraculous journeys, Azi is pleased to see that Chuck has stopped smiling.

  “So, hey! What do you think?”

  Chuck taps Azi on the shoulder, then lifts the headset away from Azi’s face. For a moment, the room they’re in takes on a kind of hyper-reality. Azi’s eyes cannot believe real life’s flawless responsiveness to his gaze, its depth of colors and textures. He feels an urge to run his fingers through the dark, carpet-like padding that covers most of the walls and ceiling, then remembers that his mission is to keep Chuck on the back foot.

  “I feel sick.”

  “Right, yeah. Some people get that. But hey, not many people have seen what you’ve seen. The synergies with what you do, the possibilities…”

  Once again, Chuck’s voice tails off in wonder. They’re in what the Institute calls its Virtual Reality Empathy Suite, which Chuck claims is the cutting edge of human–machine interactions. Azi has thus spent a few precious minutes drifting through a series of interactive representations of the Earth’s most vulnerable ecosystems in the guise of a somewhat misshapen panda.

  Chuck is being very, very nice to Azi, with a professionalism it’s impossible not to admire. So far as Chuck is concerned, Doug Dingwall is a man being brought face to face with destiny: a future colleague glimpsing the end point of every conceivable good.

  So far as Azi is concerned, he and Ad have got one chance to perform a very special trick near a centrally networked system that someone senior—namely, Chuck—is using. To maximize his chances of pulling this off, he needs Chuck to be as cognitively depleted as possible—because, experience and research suggest, this is how you fool someone who ought to know better.

  Chuck’s assimilationist bonhomie, however, seems alarmingly immune to fatigue. “We’re in the middle of a major pivot towards VR,” he says, guiding Azi towards another asymmetrically gleaming interior vista. “Strategic investments, acquisitions. Seeing is believing!”

  “Won’t it be a problem if people start believing they’re pandas?”

  Azi is being perverse, but he also genuinely dislikes virtual reality. Almost every breathless VR pitch paints a picture of infinite freedom. You put on the magic headgear and you’re released into a realm of pure imagination: you can walk on the surface of the moon, fly above the pinnacles of alien cities, hang out with friends around a Platonic campfire. Whenever Azi has actually tried it or thought about what it means, however, he has found himself faced with a technology not of escape but imprisonment.

  In VR, your body is the interface. Clumsily virtualized versions of your hands manipulate unreal objects; everything must be seen and experienced within the rules of embodiment. In VR, there is no escaping your physicality, no typing or deft mouse manipulation, no multitasking or leaping between frames of reference. You’re at the mercy of flesh in a way that ordinary life rarely achieves. And your virtual prison is entirely subject to somebody else’s control. It’s the opposite of everything Azi has ever hoped to achieve online.

  No wonder, he thinks, so many tech firms are so excited about this most coercive of tools. Why bother changing the world if you can build a virtual one, pixel by pixel, that’s pre-adjusted to corporate settings? Why let people gather in public spaces when you can build a proprietary communal experience?

  Handing the headgear back to Chuck with a nod, Azi decides to take his cue from Ad’s escalatingly urgent updates. Time to make your move, mate. Stick with what I told you. You may be able to talk tech, but Silicon Valley bollocks is a whole other ballgame. Azi turns to Chuck with a meaningful look.

  “I admit, I’m impressed. By the tech—but also by you, Chuck. It’s all about the people, right?” Chuck indicates a non-verbal approval so wholehearted Azi worries he might fall over. “So, Chuck, I would like to talk—frankly—about the kind of proposals you guys have put on the table in the past. The legal situation, a sketch of the finances. How we might move things forwards. Can you do that for me?”

  This is a big ask. But then again, if Ad’s right, Total Knowledge is a hell of a big deal around these parts—and everyone knows that informal conversations between emotionally stunted ideologues are the backbone of innovation.

  “Of course.” Chuck grins. “It would be my very great pleasure. Informally, you understand. A couple of our best guys work near my office. They can scramble, dig out some stuff. You won’t believe how fast they work! So many great kids want to work here, they’re just amazing, really. This way.”

  Azi starts to follow, only for Ad to halt him mid-step. Wait! Not yet, mate. Sorry. One thing I need to sort. Two minutes. Azi looks at Chuck, at the swoop of the long pale corridor, then barks out a single word. “Coffee.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I could really do with a coffee.” Always keep your lies as close to the truth as possible.

  “Of course! Lordy, you must forgive me, I’m not doing caffeine this month. How do you take it?”

  “Strong as you can make it.”

  For the first time, Chuck seems less than confident. Who would have thought that requests for a hot drink would deposit him outside his comfort zone? Azi pr
esses his advantage.

  “And can I take a private moment in your office, please, before the others arrive? Just the two of us.”

  “Sure, sure. Hey,” Chuck seems to have found something to smile about again, “have you tried nitro coffee? So smooth you wouldn’t believe. It’s like drinking cream! It’ll change your life.”

  Azi acquiesces, follows Chuck to a kitchen around the corner, then watches in silence as Chuck deploys what look like horror movie props—a glass-and-steel liquid nitrogen injection system, apparently—to produce a mud-brown, freezing brew. Azi sips. The liquid is soapily soft. It may be the most hatefully unnecessary thing he has ever seen done to an innocent coffee bean.

  With Chuck’s equanimity restored, they walk past rows of aspirationally labeled meeting rooms—ETERNITY, RESILIENCE, PATHOS—deeper into the heart of the building. Eventually Chuck arrives at his office. It’s nearly thirty feet long, fifteen feet wide and has no corners: half of its bubble-like exterior is glass, and half is concrete. Like everything else in this section of the building, it appears to have been scooped out of a concrete cliff, which rises dizzyingly to the roof garden through a maze of walkways, lightwells and suspended staircases. Chuck gestures with approval at its immensity.

  “The heart of the action! Beyond the wall, that’s our next-generation research. It’s mind-blowing. The battle over inner space, that’s where Erasmus believes the twenty-first century will be won or lost. Hearts and minds, beliefs and experiences, machines that know us better than we know ourselves…but all that’s beyond even my pay grade. So, come in. We can have our minute, the guys are round the corner.”

  Azi readies the phrases Ad has muttered into his ear. “There are a few things we’re working on. Integrated systems. Cloud, Big Data, ML, AI, IoT—a hybrid approach. Some really smart stuff with our data lakes, high-velocity aggregation and analysis, all blockchain-powered. We’ll be starting an investment round soon. Unless, of course—” Azi breaks off, tantalizingly, before giving Chuck what he hopes is a conspiratorial glance. “Chuck, I just remembered speaking to someone who worked here. They said you have voice-activated systems in all your offices?”